Please describe your proposed solution.
We recommend anyone reading this to read with a fresh mind and truly understand the significant potential of this project for Cardano.
We'll deliver an introductory video + 6 concise tutorials (each 5-10 mins) complete with relevant documentation, notebooks and code. All docs and code will be posted to Github and videos posted to Youtube. Our focus is to produce quality content and keep it simple.
Our series will start with an introduction to how we, a mechanical engineer and a commercial arts major, both in our 20's, ventured into the world of blockchain, token engineering, and started contributing to Cardano. We will use our story to illuminate the path for others!
To support those who participate in our tokenomics course, and join us in this next chapter of our story, we'll issue an NFT badge to participants who successfully complete module 3 and post a notebook of their cadCAD model, vetted by our team, on GitHub.
Cardano needs to attract more young talent. If others get inspired, up-skill and develop new insights from our story (why we do what we do and how we did it) and the concepts and code we share, Cardano will attract the quality creators we want to work alongside. They’ll join us, and add to Cardano for years to come.
Align open-source effort: We will attract many new developers and entrepreneurs to Cardano who'll benefit from sharing the knowledge we've already acquired. Having a common language of core token engineering concepts means the project teams they work on will understand each other, work out how they can interoperate more easily, leading to collaboration that ultimately improves interoperability. Our tutorials help build this common understanding of market mechanisms and token economics to help teams work together to build better tools.
Education for software development: If DApp product managers and software developers don’t know about token economics or token engineering concepts, they will design sub-par solutions. Designers and developers can only imagine solutions to wicked problems using the conceptual tools at their disposal – its a knowledge and labour intensive endeavour. Sharing our understanding of token engineering will give people knowledge and power to solve local problems, elegantly.
Incentive systems generate business value: Token engineering provides the conceptual tools and understanding of software implementation to help design more advanced incentive systems. Blockchain technology regulates agents' behaviour through explicit rules and the immutable recording of interactions (transactions). Most tokens are simple, used as digital monies or unique digital property, but that’s like treating the automobile as a "horseless carriage." More advanced incentive systems to create value can help solve coordination and collaboration problems. By introducing these ideas in an approachable and open way, we can encourage more people, like us, to think differently, putting Cardano at the forefront of the emerging discipline of token engineering.
New forms of governance and collaboration: Our generation and those that follow us need more scalable governance, ways to develop sustainable ecosystems, and enable people, companies, and DAOs to contribute back to our communities. We need to move past direct democratic systems which just don't scale. If we keep relying on voting — plutocratic, quadratic, approval, or one-person-one-vote — we are just reinventing a digital bureaucracy. Now is our opportunity to empower a whole generation of open-source contributors to design markets and incentive systems that do scale, are more decentralised and make designing and developing a better world for all really possible.
In essence, this project goes beyond funding a team; it fuels the future of Cardano by empowering its community (and an influx of youth) with the knowledge to harness token engineering's full potential. With this, Cardano's technological capabilities will be enhanced, attracting new participants and making the ecosystem stronger and more resilient.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
We have come to the realisation that token engineering is the crossroads where critical economic incentives, governance models, and technology meet. It's where they connect to develop flourishing socio-economic token systems. This practical, hands-on knowledge, communicated well, will significantly increase adoption and utility of the Cardano stack of technologies.
We view this educational series on token engineering as a long-term investment in the Cardano ecosystem. The series aims to shed light on how two twenty year olds fell into the world of software and how Cardano's unique EUTxO model and Native Asset support can be used to construct intricate micro-economic systems. As we continue to evolve towards the Voltaire stage of the Cardano roadmap, these token engineering principles will prove invaluable for fostering effective on-chain governance and decision-making processes.
By arming the designers and developers, and Catalyst community members more broadly, with an understanding of token engineering fundamentals, we aim to create a vibrant, interconnected system of innovators within the open-source ecosystem. Each tutorial will encourage those watching to contribute their designs back to Cardano’'s code. Building this culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing, starting with our own personal examples, and cultivating community through them, is crucial as we navigate new, uncharted territories of algorithmic governance models, market mechanisms, and beyond.
While token engineering is well established in Ethereum, our proposal's value lies in spreading awareness and practical skills within the Cardano community. If we estimate that about 60k people are currently in the Catalyst community, we believe a target of 300 (0.5%) engaging in learning token engineering within the first year of the content being released is a reasonable goal. When you account for the improvement in software development quality and the natural spread of this newfound knowledge, we anticipate a significant positive impact on the ecosystem.
<u>The Value (who benefits):</u>
Our tutorials will arm entrepreneurs, designers and developers with new concepts that will help them design better economic interactions, build open-source frameworks, construct DeFi protocols, and develop tools for DAO's and stake pool’s.
- For us as individuals: We’ll grow our understanding by teaching what we've learnt.
- The business we contribute to: Will grow its brand, attract people to its stake pool, and be able to share the thinking that makes our products possible in an open and transparent way.
- Students of this course: They’ll learn new, niche, highly sort-after skills and increase their choice of future opportunities.
- Cardano: Top of the list is attracting new, fresh thinking, young, team members and collaborators with whom we’ll all go further, together.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
To measure the success of our token engineering video series, we'll combine both qualitative and quantitative measures that reflect its direct and indirect impacts. Here's our plan:
- Video Metrics: We'll monitor the number of views for each tutorial video on Youtube, providing us with a direct measure of the interest and reach of our educational content.
- GitHub Interactions: The GitHub insights to view the number of people cloning the repo will give us a clear picture of active engagement and adoption of the content.
- Community Engagement: We will assess the quantity and quality of community interaction through different communication channels. This includes discussions, feedback, and questions related to our tutorials, which will provide insights into comprehension and application of the content.
- Progression of Token Engineering in Project Design: Over time, we expect to see token engineering progressively becoming part of the design process for future projects within Cardano, indicating the assimilation of our teachings into practical use.
- Quality Improvement in Cardano Tools: The application of token engineering concepts should lead to an improvement in the quality of tools and applications developed within the Cardano ecosystem.
- Spreading Awareness: Even if the primary outcome of this series is to attract more talented developers and increase the awareness of how token engineering can be utilized within Cardano we’ll take the win. Over time, as the topic becomes widespread, and those we teach start teaching others, more people will begin applying these techniques and Cardano will improve.
- NFT Badge Distribution: Tracking the distribution of these NFT badges will provide us with measurable insights into both the understanding and effective application of the token engineering concepts in our videos. This gamification element will increase motivation and active learning and offer another, more holistic measurement of success.
These metrics, taken together, will provide a realistic and comprehensive understanding of the direct impact and reach of our project.
The ultimate goal is to make Cardano the hub of token engineering, strengthening its standing as the premier choice for blockchain development and the place to be for young designers and developers.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
Video outputs will be shared through Cardano and Token Engineering (TE) Academy Discord channels. We’ll also get distribution through our existing Youtube and Tiktok channels and individual social media accounts. Word of mouth will also play a big role in spreading content. We will start distribution immediately after completing the content, and follow it with promotional content throughout the following months.
The first, main target audience will be developers in Cardano's ecosystem. Up-skilling those looking to learn and apply TE to their projects. This will then lead us to targeting noobs – new talent looking to pursue a career in web3 on Cardano.
In the future, for non-native english speakers, this course may be translated to multiple languages (increasing adoption and utility). And, as participants in our course master the concepts and code, demand for more advanced TE content will validate the need for more content to be created. Likely it will take on a similar structure to this project, but will include all the insights generated through this first video series.